A new major release of Novell's community-supported distro openSUSE 11 is now available and can be downloaded from the mirrors. Linux Format has a hands-on look at the new installer, SLAB menu and Compiz Fusion, and weighs up whether the distro can fight competition from Ubuntu and Fedora. Is this the start of a new era for SUSE?

I was an OpenSuse user once (before they became the Judas of Linux community) and I found Yast the slowest tool I ever used. It took hours to update 1 or 2 packages. The CPU was 100% the whole time. Horrible tool.

I never had that kind of experience. Maybe you were on dial-up.
However, before 11.0 I'll easily admit that package management wasn't the best YaST module, therefore I was an apt4rpm specialist, which I had to abandon in favour of Smart when they moved to repomd.
In openSUSE 11.0 package management has been greatly improved, especially CLI Zypper: